EPA Confused Again By PHEV's!

[PHEVadvocate]

EPA confused by Chevy Volt's fuel economy:

http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13746_7-10037173-48.html

I guess their mandate is they have to trash anything that pollutes less!:confused:

Good Link from the comments:

http://avt.inel.gov/phev.shtml (http://avt.inel.gov/phev.shtml)

Hopefully this will be sorted out before VV has somethign for sale. ;)

[RAN]

Why is it so hard to figure out? Never mind.... a rhetorical question.

With any hybrid I'm looking at, all I want to know is, what kind of mileage do I get when I'm in range-extended mode?

The 40 or so miles I can go on electric only is totally relevant if I'm going 20 miles running errands... it's totally irrelevant when I'm driving 1500 miles with little or no chance to recharge by plug in.

One thing I'm less than enthused about with Aptera is the way they try to spin their mileage figures. (Let's see... 120 mile EV range... so if you drive 125 miles, that's 10,000 mpg..... </eyeroll>)

It's not hard to see why bureaucrats are stumped. This problem requires common sense.

[Mark Tomlinson]

One thing I'm less than enthused about with Aptera is the way they try to spin their mileage figures. (Let's see... 120 mile EV range... so if you drive 125 miles, that's 10,000 mpg..... </eyeroll>)

It's not hard to see why bureaucrats are stumped. This problem requires common sense.
This is a big topic on the TeslaMotorsClub forum, which is odd because Tesla Motors has stated that all their models will be BEV (Battery Electric Vehicle).

I have to give Aptera credit, in a sort of way. They, at least, acknowledge that your mileage will vary according to whether you are using mostly battery versus mostly the ICE. They just had an engineer (I'm guessing) write the page, which is always a mistake.

The trick is that the EPA wants to have a standard comparison that works across all cars despite their battery range. The manufacturers want measurements that show off the efficiency of using the battery, regardless of the battery range. And we just want to know how much gas we're going to use, except that we all drive different distances.

The way I read the forum, TMC seems to be settling on rating PHEVs on a system like the city/highway system we have now. Do something like battery-only-mode(kWh)/hybrid-only-mode(mpg). Then let us do the math (I drive 50 miles a day, which means I run on battery most of the time and hybrid for the last 10).

[westonlgray]

I think a good solution would be what one of the X-car entry companies did, I can't remember which one. They expressed their fuel mileage as a graph of miles per gallon and distance. That way each customer could look at the chart and figure out what their mileage would be for a certain distance commute. This approach might work well for any type of Hybrid that can move under electric only power.

We still teach our kids how to read a simply x-y graph, right?

[PHEVadvocate]

agr:1http://www.aptera.com/details.php (http://www.aptera.com/details.php) go to the preformance tab to see the graph.

[westonlgray]

Another option that might be a little better is to rate a vehicle in terms of miles per kW or some other unit of energy. You could use the same type of graph (miles/kW vs. distance traveled). It would give a bonus to electric vehicles since electric power plants are more efficient that small engines, and it would also allow you to compare electric vehicles. I am sure that some electric vehicles will be more efficient than others.